Anti-gender discourse was central to the success of the 2019 electoral campaign of Poland’s ruling party, Law and Justice. Since then, the concept of academic freedom has increasingly been mobilized in this discourse as a signifier of priced Polish values, and ultimately, of how national sovereignty is perceived to be under threat. This paper asks, what is the role of the signifier of academic freedom in the anti-gender discourse’s re-articulation of Polish nationalism in the space of higher education?

The political project of the Polish government is broadly speaking based on a narrative driven by anti-liberal ideas that contest the main features of liberal democracy on the backdrop of perceived failed attempts of enacting transitional justice by political and cultural elites after the transformations of 1989 (Coman & Volintiru, 2021). While illiberal and populist radical right parties in Europe and beyond have experienced increasing parliamentary success since the turn of the millennium, Florian Bieber points out that a prevalent perception in public media that “nationalism is on the rise” is not attributable to a global shift of voters’ attitudes but to “the political and social articulation of these attitudes” (Bieber, 2018, p. 520). Andre Gingrich’s concept of neo-nationalism can be understood as one way to conceive of such emergent articulations “in a globalised period of aggressive postcolonial and post-Cold War readjustment”  (Gingrich, 2006, p. 200). In his analysis neo-nationalisms in Europe emerge and define themselves against the supranational polity of the EU, and view EU elites as a threat “from above” on the one hand, and migrants and sexual and gender minorities as a threat “from below” on the other. Consequently, a crucial element of these new articulations is the mainstreaming of radical nationalist sentiment in national political cultures transnationally by way of what Grzebalska and Pető call a gendered modus operandi (Grzebalska & Pető, 2018; Paternotte & Verloo, 2021).

In the case of Poland this mainstreaming has been observed over time. Many leading lights of populist radical right parties, who in their youth mobilized fellow skinhead radicals through crude anti-semitic tropes, would later come to rally their voters against so-called “LGBT ideology” and “neo-marxism” in a register that is perceived to be more intellectual, dignified and acceptable (Graff & Korolczuk, 2022; Pankowski, 2010). As analyzed by Szadkowski and Krzeski academic freedom itself, a core liberal principle, has recently been invoked and appropriated by the Polish government to challenge perceived censorship through state assertive policy implementation (Szadkowski & Krzeski, 2021).

It has been noted in the literature that the domain of higher education and research in Poland plays an important role for the mainstreaming of radical national sentiment in two ways: 1) academic spaces and discourse lend legitimacy and mainstream flair to neo-nationalist causes as “politics of knowledge” (Paternotte & Verloo, 2021, p. 558); 2) educational institutions have an instrumental value for the ruling party’s wider political strategy of “counter elite-populism” (Bill, 2020).

This paper builds on empirical material produced and collected in 2022 through 25 semi-structured interviews (Magnusson & Marecek, 2015). Taking into account the “complex social lives” of policies I depart from the understanding that policy formation and implementation are uniform or linear processes (Shore, Wright, & Però, 2011). I have therefore centered my fieldwork on two university campuses as case sites, and enlisted interview participants ranging from ministry representatives, national interest organization, members of faculty, students and administrative university staff (Flyvbjerg, 2010). This approach serves on the one hand to achieve a deep understanding of the social negotiations of higher education policies, and on the other hand to develop what Sobe calls an “ethical mode of comparison” that avoids the practice of ranking, denying and privileging in higher education research (Sobe, 2018). The analysis is methodologically anchored in the tradition of structural education. While having its beginnings in Louis Althusser’s Marxist concept of ideological state apparatus, structural education in David Bracker’s assessment is a tradition that has been carried forth and refined through, among others, Stuart Hall’s work on articulation and race/class, AnnMarie Wolpe’s work on feminist social reproduction theory and Martin Carnoy’s work on education’s role of mediation (Backer, 2022). For our purposes here, suffice to say that this is a tradition that understands institutions of education, including higher education, in capitalist societies as a central site for the contestation and contingent emergence of ruling ideologies such as nationalism. This paper is mindful of two crucial insights pertaining to my position as a researcher of Polish higher education. Firstly, in writing about Polish higher education as a Danish researcher crossing the “West-East divide” I am cautious of the “ideologies of Eastness” that in academic and political discourse naturalize socio-economic differences between the nation-states of the European core and those of the semi-periphery (Wolff, 1994; Zarycki, 2014). Secondly, I base my approach on the critique of methodological nationalism while also following Kosmützky’s defence of employing the nation state as an analytical and explanatory concept in international higher education research, taking into consideration the salience of the concept of nation as a macro-social explanatory unit (Kosmützky, 2015; Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002).

The preliminary findings of my document analysis address the ideological underpinnings of the government’s use of the concept of academic freedom. As a proxy of Polish national independence the concept is given a central place in several of minister Czarnek’s speeches. Significantly the speeches move beyond targeting individuals of gender and sexual minorities. They are instead performed in a higher register that stages various ideologies produced by so-called “neo-Marxism” as being threatening to Polish sovereignty itself. This high register is supported by solemn historical references to nationalist struggles within the space of higher education against “Marxism from the East” in the 20th century, which underline the urgency of the contemporary struggle against “Marxism from the West”. The anti-gender discourse and the minister’s call to defend academic freedom is in this way positioned as a direct continuation of earlier populist mass movements such as Solidarity. While still in progress the interview analysis shows an incommensurably different understanding of academic freedom in the wider academic community in comparison with the one put forward by the government. Although there is agreement across interviews that academic freedom has not been systematically weakened under the current government, it is nevertheless widely reported that academics in general are very apprehensive regarding the future conditions of the sector considering minister Czarnek’s statements. The differing understanding of academic freedom means that a range of prestigious higher education institutions have publicly contested the anti-gender discourse and its re-articulation of Polish nationalism. By doing so these higher education institutions act as a counterweight to the government’s narrative. At the same time, however, these conflicts are understood in the anti-gender discourse as confirmations of its own claim that a new academic elite is needed to protect academic freedom from attacks within the universities themselves.

Backer, D. I. (2022). Althusser and Education: Reassessing Critical Education (1 ed.). London: Bloomsbury Academic. Bieber, F. (2018). Is Nationalism on the Rise? Assessing Global Trends. Ethnopolitics, 17(5), 519-540. doi:10.1080/17449057.2018.1532633 Bill, S. (2020). Counter-Elite Populism and Civil Society in Poland: PiS’s Strategies of Elite Replacement. East European politics and societies, 0888325420950800. doi:10.1177/0888325420950800 Coman, R., & Volintiru, C. (2021). Anti-liberal ideas and institutional change in Central and Eastern Europe. European Politics and Society, 1-17. doi:10.1080/23745118.2021.1956236 Flyvbjerg, B. (2010). Five Misunderstandings About Case-Study Research. SAGE Qualitative Research Methods, 12(2), 219-245. doi:10.1177/1077800405284363 Gingrich, A. (2006). Neo-nationalism and the reconfiguration of Europe. Social anthropology, 14(2), 195-217. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.2006.tb00034.x Graff, A., & Korolczuk, E. b. (2022). Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment. Abingdon, Oxon: Taylor & Francis. Grzebalska, W., & Pető, A. (2018). The gendered modus operandi of the illiberal transformation in Hungary and Poland. Women's studies international forum, 68, 164-172. doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2017.12.001 Kosmützky, A. (2015). In defense of international comparative studies: On the analytical and explanatory power of the nation state in international comparative higher education research. European journal of higher education, 5(3), 354-370. doi:10.1080/21568235.2015.1015107 Magnusson, E., & Marecek, J. (2015). Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research: A Learner's Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pankowski, R. (2010). The populist radical right in Poland: the patriots (Vol. 12): Routledge. Paternotte, D., & Verloo, M. (2021). De-democratization and the Politics of Knowledge: Unpacking the Cultural Marxism Narrative. Social politics, 28(3), 556-578. doi:10.1093/sp/jxab025 Shore, C., Wright, S., & Però, D. (2011). Policy worlds: anthropology and analysis of contemporary power (1st ed. ed. Vol. 14). New York, NY: Berghahn Books. Sobe, N. W. (2018). Problematizing Comparison in a Post-Exploration Age: Big Data, Educational Knowledge, and the Art of Criss-Crossing. Comparative education review, 62(3), 325-343. doi:10.1086/698348 Szadkowski, K., & Krzeski, J. (2021). The common good and academic freedom in Poland. Higher Education Quarterly, n/a(n/a). doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/hequ.12349 Wimmer, A., & Glick Schiller, N. (2002). Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation–state building, migration and the social sciences. Global networks, 2(4), 301-334. Wolff, L. (1994). Inventing Eastern Europe: The map of civilization on the mind of the Enlightenment: Stanford University Press. Zarycki, T. (2014). Ideologies of eastness in Central and Eastern Europe. Abingdon, Oxon ;: Routledge.